lovaliss's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rolled up sleeves This girl moved to my town when I was in the 8th grade. It was 2 years since my brother had died and I hadn't talked about it out loud with anyone. She had glasses, long black hair down to her waist and rolled her sleeves up during volleyball practice. She was the only girl who rolled her sleeves up on her t-shirt at volleyball practice. In her old home town, everyone rolled her sleeves up at volleyball practice. She mentioned this fact and how she was self-conscious that no one else rolled their sleeves up. I liked her stamina mixed with under the surface crushing insecurity. It tugged at me. I rolled my sleeves up with her. Everyone scoffed. We were friends. She became my best friend. I realize now the reason I wanted to be friends so much was because she was the only person I knew who did not know about my brother. Who did not feel sorry for me. Who did not know this thing that felt like an incriminating secret that none of us every approached or discussed. I felt free with her--like she was my friend because she really wanted to be my friend, not because she felt sorry my brother was dead. I'm almost 28, it's been 16 years this summer since he died, but I've barely begun to process all of it these last few years. I guess this is normal for "sibling survivals" that lose an older sibling when they are kids. You have to keep processing the whole thing as you age--the grief never ends, the process is never finished, the more life you live the more you begin to connect what happened and how it affected you. Each event you approach in your life that your older sibling did not survive to experience triggers your grief over their death all over again. So things that are supposed to be happy and joyful and are always under the surface tainted with grief. I broke down the other day because I suddenly realized I was graduating from college, and he would never do that. I realized this was why I had been thinking about him so much lately, crying so much lately. When I was at my parents house a few weeks ago I went down and pulled out his "Memorial Book" while my family was at church. My mom built that book, and a shrine downstairs in the corner where his drum set used to be. She did a lot of other things to but that's for another time and another post. I pulled out the book and looked through it. There were school assignments in there that he had written. Handwriting. Written with a physical hand. He said in one of the papers, penciled in cursive, that he wanted to go to college. I instantly began to sob. I try not to hate it, that things are the way they are, or that they turned out the way they did, or that he by chance got the one kayak that had knee braces in the front while the other boys didn't. What if his shoe had come untied and he bent down to tie it, and another boy had walked up to the kayak with knee braces. One of the boys that didn't have knee braces in the kayak, that got sucked into the log jam too but popped out and up, alive. But not him. What if he had gotten food poisoning on the way there. He wouldn't have gone down the river for the first and last time ever kayaking. How can a sport you've never even done kill you? That's bad fucking luck. What if he had gotten car sick on the way that day? What if he drank a huge soda on the way there and desperately had to find a bathroom first--and the knee brace kayak would have been taken by someone else. My parents made us go to the house where all the Scouts were staying that night. We showed up that morning after being in the hospital all night. I remember feeling embarrassed to be standing in front of all these teenage boys at 5 am that we had just woken up from their sleeping bags on the floor. My dad told them he was dead. A lot of them cried. I remember looking at this one particular kid that used to bully me and thinking, "You fuck head, it should have been you. You should have died instead fuck head." Then I also felt evil and guilty for thinking something like that, because I meant it, I really felt it, sometimes I still feel it whenever I see him when I go back home. His whole family are fuck heads actually--his brother was married to my cousin for several years and he used to beat her until she tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills--she lived--and fortunately divorced him. I realize this is heavy, I wonder if I'm taking myself too seriously. If I'm telling all my stories I've never told to feel sorry for myself, or to excuse myself. I don't know it I am or not. It could be honest, I think it's honest, but it also could be dishonest. College. He wrote in cursive handwriting that he wanted to go to college. Graduating college is filled with grief for this reason. I didn't understand all this grief that's been bubbling up lately until I read his school paper. Then I broke. Then I googled "losing a sibling in childhood" and found out I am a text book case. All these things that may have been perceived as mysterious or interesting about my personality, are actually predictable and textbook. I have constantly felt like I never deserved to be alive if he was dead--understand this is not suicidal--it's survivors guilt, it's called "sibling survival." And I guess it's normal. I guess I'm normal. All things considered. But I haven't felt normal for a long time, my whole life actually. And when I realized that I didn't believe in the church, but that I had been clinging to it forever instead of dealing with the grief of his death, I finally felt ready. To confront it I mean. I had never been given any other option to deal with grief than to pray, read my scriptures, and be obedient. But the grief was so suffocating. My mom's grief was so suffocating. We were always walking on eggshells, she could just lose it for no particular reason, or the strangest reasons...like a sink full of dirty dishes. She'd break down into sobs. Which was terrifying, because it showed us that stability was a farce, that adulthood was a farce--that being an adult meant nothing, nothing was safe, nothing was permanent, nothing could be counted on, and just to be safe, it was better to expect the worst, as if expecting the worst could ever help you avoid the cold shock of those moments. We became obsessed, quiet, shut up, frightened, to ever set her off for any reason. But the reasons could not be predicted. This is why I feel certain everything is always my fault as an adult, that I've done something, that I've hurt someone, that I've offended someone, that I'm to blame somehow, in someway. It's a constant underlying feeling. But then I read that "surviving siblings" often live with a constant underlying guilt just for being alive when their sibling is not. Yes. That's it. That's precisely it. Feeling guilty for existing. Especially once I left the church--I ripped open the wound of his death and it came spewing out--all the pus, all the incestuous grief we had never compartmentalized because we could not. They said, "You thought when your brother died that nobody cared about you, but we want you to know that we lay in bed at night crying and holding each other exactly the same way we did when he died, because to us it feels exactly the same. To us, we are losing you every bit as much as we ever lost him." Yes, it wasn't fair. But it was real. And it was how they felt. And there was nothing else they could have said that would make me hate myself more. My apologetic existence wasn't even enough to make up for the fact that he was gone. And I coudln't make up for that fact. And my good behavior couldn't make up for the fact. And my pleasing and obedient tendencies couldn't make up for the fact. Because he is gone, and no it wasn't me, and maybe they wish it had been, maybe it's just me that always wished it had been because we all knew I was the "bad child." In fact my parents had a special family home evening when i was in the 3rd grade where they shared with the family that I was a "special child" and they had received premonition and revelation about this before I was born, and that they didn't know what I was sent here to do but that it was something important, and for this reason, "Satan had it out for me, and worked really hard on me for this reason..." I remember feeling bewildered--because I knew I was a horror. I remember also feeling special, a chosen one! And now I feel like that was perhaps the craziest, weirdest thing any parents could ever tell a 3rd grader--"you're so bad because Satan wants your soul because you're supposed to do something very important and special in this life..." When you see this from an outside perspective it's completely insane. But when you remember that this is their reality, and that their grief over my brother is the reason they cling to it, could never give up on it, then I think you can just feel compassion for the whole thing...and it just becomes devastating and unfortunate. And when they've said things that sting, when they've projected all of their grief over him onto me, I thought I couldn't carry it, but then I found out I could. And because I love them--I just observed--I didn't fight back, or correct, or demand rights--I just observed and realized that I had just lanced our collective abscess. And even now I don't know if they know it, if they realize it. Their grief over him had been locked up, rotting, infecting, everything in every one of us in our codependent grief--because we were kids and we lived in the middle of nowhere we were trapped--emotionally and physically--there was no room for our own grief, and they never once acknowledged it--that we had lost our brother--we were just recruited to be support because she had lost her son. This taught me compassion--this taught me how to be present with other's grief, this taught me how to observe facial expressions and body language and energy in a room so you could predict what was coming next, so you could prepare. But I lanced it all--and it came out ugly, disgusting, stench filled, rotting...and I saw it for the first time without feeling sorry for myself that I had not been given my own space...I just saw it, I wanted to take them and hold them. I saw their grief as an adult who has also felt grief, not as an angry child. I realize even know that I love them in a way that they are not capable of loving me because of the dogma that still entraps their mind. And that's okay. I am kind to their grief, kind to their belief, because they are all one and the same for them. But I feel happy to be free. I felt like I could breath for the first time. I simulataneously felt the crushing grief of his death without any relief of "answers". I've grieved it without answers, just exactly as it is, no pretend reassurances, but no cut off absolutes either. I think I'm okay just letting it be. I'm okay either way. He may not exist anymore, and he may. I think either way I'm okay. But I still miss what his life might have been. I miss time pulled out from under us. I miss that I never got a chance nor ever will get a chance to call him up and talk about life. I think of him every day. His absence is always present in my life--always there in the back of me, a deep aching emptiness. This is why I avoided relationships for so many years. Why I fled. I guess I just didn't have enough room inside. Once again, this is apparently text book for a sibling survivor. My mom didn't clean his room out for 14 years. We didn't realize there was anything weird about this til my sister's douche bag ex-boyfriend pointed it out when he visited our house before breaking up with my sister for being working class and embarrassing to him. But the Douche showed us something--that we'd been keeping this weird secret--defending this weird infected grief of our mom's all these years--pretending everything was okay, that we were okay, because we had the "gospel" and we "knew we'd see him again some day." Sometimes it's this idea that makes me so sad when I watch my mom--ever since he died she's only hoped to have him back--she's never lived in the moment since--she's lived in his death, in his life, wearing a locket around her neck with his picture in it. But I can't say I haven't lived in it either, or that I still don't. His baseball caps have continued to smell like his hair for all these years. A secret ritual I would do is to sneak down and smell his caps when I was alone in the house. There are also a few of his hairs in them. This is a total mind fuck--the same way it was a mind fuck when he died and my mind was trying to catch up with the fact that he was no longer alive, and I had to keep convincing my mind that it could not prove he existed by trying to prove existinence. Now it is the opposite. He is a memory. Not a real existence. But the smell of his hair is a total mind fuck. This last christmas I noticed she had moved the hats--when I asked where they were she told me in a tupperware bin in the top of his closet. I remember feeling frantic when I asked her--I remember feeling frantic at the thought that she had gotten rid of them, so I'm as guilty as her. And when I pulled them out of his closet, and out of the tupperware, I put my face into them and realized it had faded...I could barely smell his hair anymore. I felt it all crumbling. It was the only proof I had had for his existence all this time, this secret thing I had been clinging to the entire time I scoffed her for clinging. I looked at the one strand of his blonde hair in there. Mind fuck. His hair, that he grew from his head, from a follicle, that was in his skin, that covered his body...that was alive. Mind fuck. I cannot comprehend. But I lost it. I lost it. Right there in front of my mom. I walked out and cried in the bathroom with the door open and the lights out. I didn't feel I had to explain myself. And she never asked. I did this again a few weeks ago when I read the Memorial Book. I cried again. Losing the smell of his hair feels every bit as real as it felt to lose his body. Slowly it's fading and slowly I'm reluctant to let go. Even though I talk a big talk about being okay. But college. He will never go to college, he never got to go to college. And here I am. A sibling survivor graduating from college. Fuck. So it is. Everytime I think of him and feel grief, I light a candle next to his picture and remind myself that grief is the only way to the gift of compassion--I remind myself to feel it for everyone, not just myself, to let the grief be collective instead of selfish, only collective grief can become compassion. But I miss him. I miss what my life would have been, I miss what his absence hints at. I feel it every day. But eventually it becomes okay that it's not okay. until I realize it's there, until I realize the hollow space is his abscence--I just forget that's what it is--it's become so comfortable all these years. I think it's okay that his hats are fading, I think it's necessary. But it still causes me to panic--if I can't smell his hair anymore, I have no proof he existed. And after so much time--you can't tell the difference between then and a dream--they feel as equally as real. I copied the picture of us from his funeral. I've been forcing myself to look at it--at each one of us--at the grief in our faces--and how familiar it is still--how we still have it in our eyes. I look at it and practice compassion for that moment because so many people experience that moment right now. This may seem crazy. I'm tired. And I feel like I said what I needed to say, what I've been thinking. There's more, there's lots more. But that's just for now. In one solid paragraph. So be it. When I lanced our pus infected wound I freed us somehow. Though I know they cannot see it yet. Facing their grief over me forced them to face their grief over him we had pretended all these years was healed, but it wasn't, we were just "enduring" until it was over. For the first time in our lives we don't have to talk about "Second Coming" talk--for the first time they don't say these things anymore because I broke up the codependent pus infected wound. For the first time they've been forced live now, right here right now, because this may be the only time they have here with me in their minds. For the first time I feel like we are strangely free. And it's had this bottom up effect on everyone--everyone is healing now that the wound has been lanced. The illusion was shattered. They don't know this--but I do--and it's a relief. They still feel grief over him and over me. And I feel mostly kindness towards that grief. I love them in a way they can never love me--uncondtionally, as is, facing it, witnessing it for exactly what it is. I'm also happier than I've ever been. Though it's also been heavier than it's ever been. I think they make sense together. The girl with the rolled up sleeves called tonight--we talked for the first time in 7 years. I didn't come out to her that I had left the church--I often realize it's not a thing anyone still in it can fathom. I think she may know though--she asked at one point, "How are you though--are you doing good? Are you happy?" What I know she cannot understand is that I am more happy and more miserable simultaneously, and because of that it overall means more happy--because it's real, it's authentic, no fear that cowers in pretend answers for what I cannot know. I'm just here, alive, and present, and particpating in this whole giant mystery--I don't know why it is and I don't know why it isn't. And that's just it--that's where you can live and be fully present to being alive, right on the knife's edge of uncertainty without excuses. 3:56 a.m. - 2012-03-15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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